The Best of Galaxy’s Edge 2013-2014 Read Online Free PDF Page B

pins.
    We didn’t have to make it airtight, but we’d gotten our best results that way in previous encounters.
    A text went to our list, and “blooped” on everyone’s cells at the same time.
    Sven: coming.
    “Oh god!”
    “Are we ready?”
    “We’ve got to be!”
    “Hide!”
    Behind the bed, two of us; in the bathroom, three; in the closet space behind the door, me. I was in the danger point. When Wendy realized she’d been trapped, Sven would be the closest focus for her wrath, but I’d be next in line, just standing in a little square depression against the folded-up ironing board.
    * * *
    A note on diversity.
    I really haven’t been able to give you a sense of myself as a character. You know I’m Peter and that I work in an office, right? You can picture me in my 20s, 30s, or 40s, somewhere in there. But this account isn’t really a portrait of me. I could tell you childhood memories of my brother (the one who was killed by Wendy, starting me on my quest for vengeance), and I could describe myself eating a microwave burrito in the break room just before I took half a day off, staring at my reflection in the oven door and pondering stuff. Agonizing over how the ignorant masses, who don’t know anything about Wendy, are free to go on with their petty little lives while I am trapped in a cycle of blah blah blah.
    Look, I’m going to kill Wendy, all right? The end. I hope the prospect of imminent blood and guts keeps you here, and that’s all I can do.
    But here’s a much easier way to score some points.
    We’re diverse.
    Our group included two Hispanics, one African American, two guys who I think were gay, and Sven was an immigrant. Two were women.
    That is a very diverse body of people. It is the modern American society. Admirable, no? But I’m not up to doing characterization.
    We’re just a group of pissed-off victims who got together to kill Wendy.
    Maybe that’s the greatest crime of the damned Wendys. By killing our loved ones, by attempting to kill us, the old bitch has flattened our individuality. She has made a mob of us. Maybe that’s why I can’t develop myself, or Jamal, or Sven, or anyone other member of our local chapter of the Roanoke Society into a three-dimensional human being for you to care about.
    And the worst part of it all is, “Wendy” is actually just a mob of different beings. The being that destroyed the Roanoke colony isn’t the same as the being that ate the crew of the Mary Celeste , at least we don’t think so. But just like soldiers over the years personified their faceless enemies as a single Johnny Reb or Fritz or Charlie, so too have we referred to them as a single “Wendy.” And like Satan being a more interesting character than God in Paradise Lost , so too are we good-guy mortals left as mere fodder to strengthen the legend of a flesh-devouring creature.
    Some native tribes called it the wendigo .
    We’re Chuck Wepner fighting Muhammad Ali. No matter how many rounds we win, we’ll be forgotten, and your interest will remain with our opponent—don’t tell me you haven’t been thinking it! It ain’t frigging fair.
    * * *
    I’ve never been at any surprise parties for people. I just saw them on TV. People jump out when someone opens the door and turns on the lights. It always feels like a surprise party for Wendy.
    We heard them in the hallway. Sven was laughing—a bit too loud, too forced—and a woman’s voice laughed along with him. I saw the door handle move. A soft buzz told me he’d inserted the key card into the room.
    Sven screamed.
    She’d smelled it, somehow. So she attacked poor goddamn Sven in the hallway.
    The others jumped from their hiding places. “Open the door! Open the door!” more than one yelled. Everyone had their talismans out, their heavy-duty garbage bags, their ropes, their holy water; all the potpourri of weapons that usually, one or another, killed Wendy.
    I opened the door, and was shielded from whatever happened in the